


Old Haunts

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-10
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-13 00:11:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5687044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey gets her education where she can, when she can. If this includes being a bystander to argumentative tavern conversations, regarding Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and the difference between twelve and fourteen parsecs, so be it. And she already knows how important myths can be, when you've got nothing else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Haunts

…

Being a Jedi, Rey thinks, is probably a lot like being a ghost.

You can fly through the air, for one thing, since gravity is more or less the same as any other well-intended law – it requires the occasional breach for its observance to be fully appreciated. You can be in two different places at once, assuming someone else’s mind actually counts as a physical space. You can probably walk through walls just by thinking about it hard enough, or else by not thinking about it at all. 

(Such feats would require a sort of don’t-look-down mentality, the same necessary and willful suspension of logic that has gotten Rey across many a narrow steel beam.)

And if you’re a ghost, or maybe if you’re Luke Skywalker, your continued existence depends entirely upon a matter of belief and opinions. 

“…It’s a shovelful of dung, if you ask me.” Drego is a Kyuzo deputy with watery yellow eyes and a sepulchral personality. “Have you heard even half the things they say about him? I could fertilize a field with the stuff.”

Rey scrapes a fried potato off the bottom of a greasy skillet and eats it with her fingers.

She leans in the kitchen’s narrow doorway, head poked out just far enough to catch the tavern conversations. It’s an inn, strictly speaking, the only one that Jakku has or needs, but mostly everyone comes here in search of either food and drink or something senseless to argue about. The tavern’s interior – much like its clientele – is made from salvaged parts, scrapped pieces brought together by screws and welding torches and apathetic whimsy. 

If Rey has bad luck scavenging, several days in a row, Tuli’mak the innkeeper usually lets her lick out all the dirty pots – so long as she washes them afterwards, that is. Sometimes she even gets to eat the scorched bottoms off the bread. She is twelve years old. 

“Luke Skywalker blew up the first Death Star in one shot,” another Kyuzo militiaman counters, in a philosophically inebriated voice. “He blindfolded himself with a womp rat skin to do it.”

Drego scowls. “Why in hell would he blindfold himself?”

“So he could _see_ better _,_ you witless wonder. I mean, really _see_. It’s one of those Jedi magic trick things.”  

“Oh, really? Should that explain your piloting, then? You’ve got your eyes closed the whole time?”

“I always heard how he disguised himself as Darth Va – ” everyone hisses the Rodian silent before he can say anything further, because to speak that name aloud might invite something unwanted through a chink in the wall. “Well. I heard he disguised himself and killed old Emperor Onionskin single-handed.”    

“You mean in a literal way?” Tuli’mak dries her hands, twisting the rag around each finger. “Because somebody told me the man’s hand was made of metal.”

Tuli’mak comes from Askaj, originally. She possesses a monumental pair of hips and an apron whose various splotches often double as the inn’s menu. Patrons who beg Tuli’mak to have a heart are dutifully informed that she in fact possesses two, in perfect working order, and that at the present moment both are engaged in the serious business of not giving a desert rat’s hind-end. Promises will not put food into your bowl, she says.

“Was his right hand the metal one, or his left?” a human man asks. 

“Left, right? Who cares?”

“Huh.” The man swirls a half-empty glass of knockback nectar. A wicked glint snaps through his eyes. “Depends which one he uses to –”

Tuli’mak reaches over, curls a companionable hand around the back of his head, and then bashes it down against the bar so quickly that it leaves a dent. The man crumples off his stool in a senseless heap. 

(There are signs posted above the front door, after all, about this inn being a respectable establishment. Uncivilized behavior and language may be tolerated at Ergel’s Bar over in Cratertown, but Tuli’mak wants no truck with it.)

Rey munches another crisped-black potato skin. Gusting sand outside rubs itself past the inn’s shuttered windows like a cat.  

“…The Ewoks on Endor worshiped him as a god, I think,” says one burly Feeorin, after a silence. He wears metal bands on all his head-tendrils, which click softly when he reaches over to swipe up the man’s unfinished drink. “Those furry things they make into jerky, on Abafar? Tastiest stuff I ever ate.”

“Didn’t Skywalker strangle some Hutt with a metal chain, too? That’s the biggest lie of all. You ever get a good look at how big around a Hutt’s neck is? It’d take the strength of ten.”

“No, it was his twin sister who did that. The princess.” Tuli’mak looks up in sighing admiration. The man, who Rey is beginning to suspect might be dead for real, gives a twitch. “Strangulation was a very ladylike choice. Keeps the hands clean – my second cousin Yarna danced at her wedding, you know.”

“Who’d the princess marry?” Rey realizes that she’s wandered beyond the kitchen doorway, the skillet still cradled in one arm. She talks through a full mouth. “Was he a Jedi, too? Aren’t there any other Jedi at all besides Luke Skywalker?”

(Several gazes are turned away at this question, although Rey doesn’t especially notice.) 

The inn’s hired singer answers first, an Abednedo with long black eyes and a silver bolt through her reptilian nose. She charges more for performing happy songs than sad ones because she says the former requires an exhausting amount of imagination. 

“Oh, no. Much better. She married Han Solo.”

A reverent hush passes over the assembled company then, swiftly as the shadow of a huge-winged bird. Rey glances around before deciding she’ll have to ask.

“Who is that? Should I know him?”

“You and everyone else, runt. He was the best smuggler in the galaxy. Or, is – and I say that without prejudice, too.” The Rodian raises a knobby-fingered hand as proof. “The king of honest thieves and golden-hearted scoundrels.”

“Tell me something, though – did his ship really make the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs?”

“What, the Millennium Falcon? No, it was thirteen.”

“My father told me twelve.”

“I heard eleven.”

“Twelve.”

“Impossible,” the Feeorin snorts. Pale soot beneath his fingernails suggests a job down in the quarries. “I’ve flown the Kessel Run myself. It can’t be done in less than fourteen parsecs.”

“Why?”

“You’d have to rip right through the fabric of space to cover it in that distance. You’d fly through some wormhole and come out the other end with your elbow and ass swapped around.”

“As if anybody on this floating junk heap knows the difference.”

“Not those crackpots over in Tuanul, at least.” 

They all break into riotous laughter, although Rey is not quite certain what’s so funny. Their shouts and chatter float up overhead to join the foolish stories. She seats herself on an upended bucket and chews contemplatively as she listens. 

Soon everyone forgets that she’s there. 

When her family comes back – she’s got this planned out very carefully – the first thing they’ll do is have a meal together. Preferably it will be breakfast, which Rey likes best whenever she can get it. Breakfast is a banquet of the new day’s possibilities.

Although there will be other things that come first, naturally. She’s planned that part out too: they will come to her at sunrise, down from a cloudless morning sky. They will run towards each other across the slipping desert sand, and Rey will knock them over flat when they collide. She will serve them each a loaf of bread, real bread without a single burnt corner, and they’ll eat their food straight from a hot skillet as they sit crowded inside the AT- AT. They will admire her flowers, count the tallies on her wall. They will laugh at the jokes she tells them. 

Then they will tell Rey how clever she is, how brave and patient and good she has been for waiting so long. As their hostess she will be able to say something well-timed and graceful, about how it wasn’t long and how she could’ve waited years and years more if she’d really had to. They will forgive her for this one small, harmless lie. 

She will accept their apologies in turn. 

 _(“And there’s blue, all around! As far as you can see, straight out to the horizon – a green island floating between the water and sky. Are you imagining it? Won’t that be beautiful?”_  

When Rey dreams, it is about this voice. Sometimes there will be the added impression of a hand pinning up her hair, or of arms holding her, and she’ll wake each time with her heart hanging by a thread. 

 _“Some day, we’ll all be there together,”_ the voice always tells her. _“I promise. Can you believe me, Rey?”)_

Well. 

Luke Skywalker might be a myth, alongside that nonsense about princesses, and impossible powers, and a ship that can plummet down the back of one galaxy and leap up the side of another like the bird it is named after. 

But Rey has to tell herself that this – this, this – is not a myth at all, that it must be true, even if it seems to exist nowhere except inside her head. That’s how belief is supposed to work.

(Don’t look down, don’t look down.)

“…Say, now, little steel-pecker,” she hears, suddenly. “The food’s not too bad, is it?”

Rey blinks and glances up. 

Tuli’mak has squatted down. She waves a hand in front of Rey’s eyes as though she’s wiping stains off a table. Rey prods her own face with two grimy fingers to discover that her cheeks are damp with tears. 

She’s gone and made the pan soggy, too, and probably spoiled whatever’s left of the fried potatoes, although her mouth apparently never received the message to stop chewing. 

But on a planet that receives approximately one half-inch of rain per year, crying is an indulgence nobody can allow themselves for too long at a time: so Rey draws a breath, dries her face on the corner of her skirt, and a moment later she shakes her head. 

“No,” she says. “I’m just tired."

…

And when Rey finally comes to stand before Luke Skywalker, she must observe that – despite the gray face, despite the way wind seems to pass through him metal hand and all, despite how his mind curls like smoke around its edges – he is unusually solid for a ghost.

(Then again, so is she.)

…


End file.
